On the Texas AFL-CIO, a altering of the guard in a time of development

This text was initially revealed by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative information outlet and journal. Join their weekly e-newsletter, or observe them on Fb, X, and Bluesky.

For labor organizing, Texas was lengthy dismissed as a forlorn place.

“Proper-to-work” legal guidelines limit organizing right here, most public-sector employees can’t collectively discount or strike, and native governments are broadly banned from passing their very own employee rights ordinances.

But whole membership in Texas unions has been rising. In response to knowledge from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 603,000 Texans belonged to unions in 2024, up from nearer to half one million a decade in the past (although the union density price has remained steadier beneath 5 %). For the previous eight years, Rick Levy steered this development because the president of the Texas AFL-CIO and as secretary-treasurer for the prior two. He retired in early December, concluding three a long time of labor with the state labor federation. 

“My causes for retirement are many, (together with that I’m previous AF),” Levy, who’s 68, wrote in his announcement. 

Levy typically joked round and downplayed his function as he spoke with me about his lengthy profession within the Texas labor motion. Despite the fact that he’s been a lawyer for a lot of his life, he acts and talks extra like an organizer, all the time utilizing the phrase “we” when referring to the group’s accomplishments. It was his imaginative and prescient to broaden the management of the group that has helped form how the state federation has developed. And it was the wave of actions from the Nineteen Sixties to at this time that formed Levy’s management on the Texas AFL-CIO. 

As a toddler, Levy grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, when the town’s Black group was preventing to combine the college district. “You possibly can’t develop up in an setting like that and never have it contact you,” Levy mentioned. 

When pupil protests roiled faculty campuses within the Nineteen Seventies, Levy participated in sit-ins at Stanford College to demand the college divest from its pursuits in apartheid South Africa and guarantee equal employment and pay for Black employees on campus. Even because the police stormed onto the campus to take away protestors, Levy and different college students refused to budge. This incident and successive protests landed him in jail a number of instances. After graduating, he went by a collection of jobs—as a faculty bus driver, supply truck driver, and a bookstore cashier—to help what he calls his “important job”: organizing. 

Impressed by the courtroom battles he witnessed, Levy graduated from legislation college and located his option to Tyler to work as a civil rights and labor legal professional. The Piney Woods area has a protracted historical past of civil rights and labor struggles. The world was the positioning of the Texas Sick Rooster Strike within the Fifties, the ladies employees’ strike on the leather-based merchandise Schoellkopf plant in 1979, and the Goodyear Tire plant strike in 2006. Daves, McCabe & Hahn, the legislation agency the place Levy labored, was well-known for its work in landmark civil rights instances, equivalent to Plyler v. Doe, the 1982 Supreme Courtroom case that forbade states from denying youngsters a free public college training based mostly on immigration standing. The case’s presiding U.S. district decide, William Wayne Justice, who additionally ordered the Texas Training Company to desegregate public colleges and the Texas jail system to reform its situations, was based mostly in Tyler. 

“There was a small group of progressive of us who have been attempting to alter the world … they usually took me below their wings,” Levy mentioned. 

Then Ronald Reagan turned president. When Reagan launched his onslaught in opposition to employees’ rights, Levy determined it wasn’t sufficient to combat within the courts.  

“We had been on the innovative, making adjustments, after which as type of the political local weather modified … the legislation wasn’t actually making the type of affect that I wished,” Levy mentioned. “After I got here to the state [federation], it was as a result of I may very well be a part of the labor motion, which was attempting to alter the legal guidelines and attempting to alter the politics.” 

In 1990, when Levy joined the Texas AFL-CIO as its authorized and training director, union membership within the state was in a deep swoon. From 1964 to 1984, Texas union density fell from 14 % to eight % and continued dropping after that. Levy recalled the state federation employed solely 10 workers members then, largely males and largely white. A lot of its work revolved round politicking and lobbying members of the Democratic Celebration, then in its last years of ruling Texas. 

“Rick noticed early on that it was going to be some time earlier than we began successful statewide elections once more,” mentioned the Texas AFL-CIO’s former communications director Ed Sills, who labored with Levy for 3 a long time earlier than retiring final yr, added that Levy might all the time discover “alternative in disaster.” 

At the same time as organized labor’s energy on the state Capitol waned, Sills mentioned Levy “believed we might do extra” than interact in state politics and rejuvenated the state federation’s employee training and management coaching packages. “Rick understood that if you wish to have a motion that lasts, you want to continuously be creating new management.”

When Levy turned president, he’d additionally recruited Montserrat Garibay, who was elected secretary-treasurer. It was the primary time a Hispanic particular person served as an officer for the state federation. 

“He noticed one thing in me that I didn’t even notice,” Garibay mentioned, calling Levy “an incredible mentor.” On the time, Garibay was the vice chairman of Training Austin, an affiliate of the Texas American Federation of Lecturers and, earlier than that, a bilingual kindergarten trainer. “I wasn’t the same old candidate. I used to be a frontrunner with a humorous identify, with an accent, an immigrant, however he actually embraced that,” she mentioned. After greater than three years within the function, Garibay was handpicked by the Biden administration for a task with the U.S. Division of Training. At the moment, she’s working within the Democratic main for Texas Home District 49, an open seat in Austin. 

Throughout his tenure, Levy expanded the federation’s govt board and workers and included extra ladies and other people of colour. He shaped the annual Ladies’s Summit for girls organizers, which formed the group’s priorities on points equivalent to reproductive freedom. And he created a program to coach younger activists to grow to be labor organizers. Levy mentioned his “best day” was when these younger organizers shooed him out of that group’s annual assembly so they might lead the dialogue.

However his efforts to broaden union membership encountered opposition at instances. Levy mentioned that again when he joined, “A fairly broad part of the motion, in case you requested them what their immigration stance was, would say to name the immigration authorities. It was an us versus them perspective.”  Beneath Levy, the federation began conducting citizenship clinics throughout Texas, a venture Garibay had began in Austin. Leaders educated members on why solidarity with immigrant employees was important to constructing the labor motion. In consequence, members began volunteering within the clinics. “Via some actually troublesome conversations, numerous unions took the lead saying, ‘All employees are a part of the working class and all employees deserve illustration.’ And we began to prepare in a approach that was a lot much less exclusionary,” Levy mentioned. 

“He noticed a special future for the Texas AFL-CIO,” Garibay mentioned, “the place all of us might be welcomed, and all of us might be a part of the labor motion.”

Efforts to develop the management and membership from the underside up helped result in profitable organizing campaigns for native associates prior to now few years. In 2022, nurses at Ascension Seton Medical Heart in Austin voted to hitch the Nationwide Nurses Union. Staff at main Texas information publications, together with the Dallas Morning Information, The Texas Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman have efficiently unionized in recent times. And in Houston, Hilton lodge employees with UNITE HERE Native 23 gained a brand new contract on October 10, guaranteeing a $20 per hour minimal wage, stronger security protections, and fewer workload after placing for 40 days. 

Levy mentioned that, in contrast to conventional labor struggles, these organizing campaigns have been shifting past financial calls for to battles for the general public good. Nurses organizing demanded much less workload to guard sufferers’ security; reporters uncovered how media monopolies have been “gutting their capacity” to cowl essential tales; and academics denounced the “underfunding and the hollowing out of our public training system for Greg Abbott’s voucher rip-off,” Levy mentioned. He believes this unity between employees and the group is why public opinion of unions is so excessive now. 

These latest unionizing victories in Texas are catching nationwide consideration. “Everybody has all the time recognized the facility that Texas employees have, however it hasn’t been till lately, and particularly with sturdy management, that we’ve been in a position to arrange in some new and other ways to leverage energy and energy utilizing artistic techniques. It’s taken a while, however the Nationwide has positively taken discover,” mentioned Liz Shuler, president of the nationwide AFL-CIO. She added that the nationwide group has been investing extra sources in Texas, particularly with Levy’s efforts to strengthen regional labor federations throughout the state. 

Austin Congressman Greg Casar labored along with Levy on varied pro-labor coverage fights on the native, state, and federal ranges. “Nobody has accomplished greater than Rick Levy for the modern-day labor motion in Texas,” Casar mentioned. 

After I requested others what it’s they’ll miss essentially the most about working with Levy, Casar, Shuler, and different federation leaders talked about how Levy opened every assembly with a snarky quip or welcomed new leaders by warning them, “Don’t screw it up!” Sills recalled how Levy turned some workers conferences into informational scavenger hunts. “He put individuals comfy by humor,” Sills mentioned. 

After I requested Levy what he’s most happy with from his tenure as president of the Texas AFL-CIO, he spoke once more of the group’s new management. The federation’s new president is Leonard Aguilar, a San Antonio union plumber, who turned a frontrunner within the commerce unions, then secretary-treasurer of the state federation. Lorraine Montemayor, a state worker who, by the federation’s management coaching program, turned an organizer with the Dallas American Federation of Lecturers after which the political director for the Dallas AFL-CIO, is now the secretary-treasurer. It will likely be the primary time that two Latino leaders will helm the Texas AFL-CIO.  

“For any organizer, their primary job is to prepare themselves out of a job. And I really feel like I’ve accomplished that,” Levy mentioned. “They’re going to have the ability to take it to locations that I might by no means even think about.”

Levy is leaving the Texas AFL-CIO throughout one other historic onslaught in opposition to employees. This time, Levy mentioned, the federation is organized. He reminds Texas employees, “The cavalry shouldn’t be driving in to save lots of us. To the extent we’re going to get saved, it’s as a result of we’re going to prepare and we’re going to face with one another.”

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